Modern electronic devices rely upon interconnection of various components to form circuits. These electronic components are typically mounted on printed circuit boards, which have copper traces routed along and within the circuit board that provide electrical connections between components mounted to the circuit board. Even with the ever-shrinking size of electronic components and the common use of circuit boards with several layers of copper conductors, increased circuit density is still desired for some applications such as personal computers, cellular telephones, and other such devices.
One way that this increased circuit density can be accomplished is by using multiple printed circuit boards connected to each other. The various boards containing parts of an electronic circuit or device can be interconnected via cables, such as a ribbon cable attached to two different circuit boards, or by connectors attached to the circuit boards that can connect directly to each other. Such electrical connectors can serve to both electrically and physically attach one circuit board to another, allowing two or more printed circuit boards to be mounted parallel to and directly above or below to each other.
Such a technique facilitates use of irregular spaces inside an electronic device, where the circuit board area available in two dimensions might be limited but the volume in three dimensions is relatively large. A series of smaller, stacked circuit boards will enable efficient use of such space, and provide the increased circuit density desired.
Also, a stacked circuit board connection system allows easy addition or upgrade of various circuit components. For example, a home theater audiovisual receiver might have plenty of space available in the chassis for various circuits, but can utilize a stackable, removable printed circuit board circuit module that can be easily removed and replaced to provide upgrades to the latest surround sound functionality and standards.
Stacked circuit board connector systems are particularly well suited to applications where one or more separate circuit modules may be added to an electronic circuit to provide various functions. For example, multiple audio coding circuit board modules may be attached to a base system such that one module supports each channel to be coded. In such an example, power must be supplied to each module, and each module must be individually addressable by the base system for communication purposes. That is, the bus that interconnects each module must have some way of addressing each module individually, such as by an address-based protocol or hardware configuration of the independent modules.
What is desired is a system facilitating connection of multiple non-shared bus devices with a motherboard in a modular stackable configuration that does not require hardware or address configuration to independently address the multiple devices.